The TPE Travelbot was a prototype Facebook Messenger AI bot developed for TransPennine Express. The first version was developed and released for a time to gather usage data to inform future development, but the project was halted as the coronavirus pandemic began making its impact on train travel

I was the sole developer of the bot, which was built with javascript on AWS’ server-less lambdas and Amazon Lex (the technology behind Alexa). The maturity of the Lex bot’s Machine Learning model was built up as more users interacted with it – expressing their requests in different ways. By reviewing commands that the bot failed to recognise and adding them to the model with their expected associated action, the bot was able to interpret more and more varied commands.